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Saturday, April 29, 2017

The bankruptcy of Tesla will be merely a part of the tech crash of 2020.

Tech is going to crash in a few years. Why do I say that? Well, it crashes every decade or so, and we are about due. It takes a long time for companies to fail. I was blogging about Sears closing its doors back in 2010. Well, seven years later, they still teeter on the brink of bankruptcy. Maybe this year.... But you know it will come, eventually.

It took a long time for GM to fall, and in retrospect, we all saw the signs. We knew that schemes like the Elio 3-wheeler wouldn't make it, but enough people bought the stock, loaned them money, and put down "deposits" that they are technically still in business today, although insolvent. Radio Shack took forever to topple, was bought out in bankruptcy by private equity, and toppled yet again. These things take time, be patient.

The problem for Elon Musk is that he is a visionary and visonaries, as I noted before, are often failures in their own lives even if they inspire us to greatness. Mark Zuckerberg, in contrast, is a schmuck, and schmucks always make a lot of money, at least for themselves.

Yes, Tesla turned a small profit in the last quarter of 2016, but that wasn't due to the sales of cars, but to the sales of emissions credits to the State of California. Now, don't get me wrong, as an Automotive and Electrical Engineer, I want to see the electric car succeed on its own merits - and it will, eventually. But it is likely that it will succeed under a GM, Ford, BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, or VW nameplate.

The problem for Tesla, is that he is literally re-inventing the wheel here, starting a car company from the ground up, a visionary idea that has bankrupted many people in the past - if they weren't just scams from the get-go. Tesla is demonstrating there is a demand for electric cars, and other manufacturers are rushing in to join the party - nearly every manufacturer in the world has some sort of electric car for sale in showrooms right now. Granted, not many are as nice as the Tesla or have the range, but many are also a lot cheaper, and range is really not as much of an issue as people think. It is nice to be able to go 300 miles in Tesla between charges. But no, that isn't enough to make it a practical car to take a long trip in, as you will likely go more than 300 miles when you drive to Disney World.

The big problem for Tesla is Trump. Trump will drop EPA CAFE requirements from the staggering 50 mpg slated for as soon as 2021 (which is not far away!). Electric cars allowed manufactures to reach this goal, as they had an "equivalent" MPG in the hundreds. Take away the CAFE requirement and you take away the need for electric cars.

The one-two punch will be low oil prices. With new pipelines going in (and don't believe the press about "protests" stopping them - look at standing rock, it accomplished nothing) and the oil sands from Canada and Bakken reserves from America, we are poised to be awash in a sea of cheap oil. Venezuela will keep exporting oil to prop up its sagging economy. And our friends in the middle-east are desperate to pump, not to mention Russia. Short of a major war in the region, an oil shortage does not look likely.

It is hard to sell electric cars in an era of $2 gas - particularly a stable era of $2 gas.

Now look, I'm not saying this is right, just the way it is. I would prefer to see a world with electric cars being recharged at home stations from solar panels and wind energy. That would be nice. It will happen, and maybe if Hillary were President it would have happened soon. But Trump is now President, and a lot of subsidies for electric, solar, and wind power will go by the wayside in favor of subsidies for the oil and gas industries.

The other problem for Musk is that like any good visionary, he has his hands in a lot of pies - a lot of money-losing pies. Hyperloop sounds like a great idea, but the amount of money to build it would be staggering - in the trillions. Whether private capital could even afford to do this is questionable. It is hard to see how Musk can make a profit at it. Or his space exploration dreams. Again, visionary. Profitable? Only so long as NASA pays for launches. If the ISS is decommissioned as scheduled in the 2020's, well, there maybe a big drop in launch demand.

But enough about Musk. What about the rest of the tech sector? What about it? The big problem for tech is there is no compelling new product coming out. Smart phone saturation is near 100% - there are no new customers left and that leaves only replacement and conquest sales. I'd buy a new smartphone tomorrow, but my Galaxy S4 does everything I need it to. Why risk hundreds of dollars on a new phone? Like the PC market, it has matured, and sales will plateau from now on.

Pundits posited that wearables or 3-D VR would be the "next big thing" that everyone would have to have. But while "everyone" needs a smart phone today (it has gotten so you have to have one to interact in society anymore) you don't really need a fitbit or a Oculus headset to get along. And VR, like 3-D before it, will turn out to be less than what people expect. Zuckerberg envisions a society where everyone will interact in 3-D VR (read: VR porn) and thus will have to have this technology.

Two problems: First of all, this VR crap is basically already included in most new phones. You snap the phone into a headband and you're there. So companies like Oculus will have a hard time selling a standalone VR headset that is just a headset and not also your phone. The second problem is that not everyone will want to live in a VR world, just as a lot of people found 3-D movies and television (remember that?) to be a hassle and disorienting. It simply isn't as compelling as basic tech like the smart phone.

And we've seen this before in tech, many times. When Windows 95 came out, the industry geared up for everyone to dump their old PCs for new Windows-compatible units. Problem was, a lot of people were still happy with their old Windows 3.1 machines, and some even running on DOS just fine, thank you. The big market hit turned out to be nothing - there was no compelling need to upgrade, when old technology worked just fine. People do make rational economic choices with technology sometimes.

But what about social media? Won't that continue to be profitable? Well, to begin with, it really isn't very profitable. And people are starting to discover how odious it can be. Twitter is admitting that millions of its users are fake accounts set up to "follow" people and make their comments seem more popular than they are. Facebook is grappling with the same issue and admitting their platform is being used by Russian trolls to influence public opinion.

Again, we saw this all before. In the DOS era, we would access "news groups" (the source of the "alt." nomenclature used by the alt.right)to go online and interact with other people. So long as it was just computer nerds, it was just the usual sort of time-wasting on the computer. But I recall vividly seeing the first SPAM on a usenet newsgroup. It was like a shell-shock, as I realized there was really nothing anyone could do to prevent spam on these open forums. And within a year or so, the SPAM and trolls outnumbered real postings by 2:1, then 10:1 then 100:1 as more and more people fled these groups and went to privately run websites to discuss various topics - websites that were moderated or charged a fee to join. Newsgroups were dead. Oh, they're still there, just as Second Life and MySpace still exist. Just no one goes to Newsgroups anymore and they are just full of SPAM.

Many online forums became ghost towns the same way. People migrated to new forums, leaving old ones behind, as flame-wars and troll-wars erupted. AOL "Newsgroups" were once wildly popular, but fell by the wayside. This is not ancient history, either, but things that happened only a decade or two ago, and continue to happen today.

So Zuckerberg has to figure this out and fast. The problem is, to moderate all of Facebook will require some really clever bots, or a lot of human beings working in real-time. We are already seeing that it takes them nearly a day to take down suicide or murder videos - the most outrageous of content. How can they hope to stop Fake News? They can't, without moderators, and that costs money. Bots don't cut it, as trolls learn what the bots are looking for and then spoof around them, sort of the same way con-artists on Craigslist get around their bots and list the same trailer for sale in all 50 states.

I got off Facebook when I saw the potential for evil in it. Even regular postings by regular people turned into an exercise in narcissism. I didn't like who I became on Facebook - and no one is like their profile on Facebook. Similarly, I stopped reading Reddit when it became a toxic mix of alt.right, Trump supporters, Russian trolls, and "red pill" idiots. Reddit just left me depressed, no matter how much they tried to cheer me up with cute cat pictures. And Twitter? Two words: Donald Trump. That, and the fact that only the media uses Twitter. I've never been on Twitter, but read the tweets all the time in "the News" - how does this business model make sense? I mean, it is losing money like mad.

So it is possible we could even see "social media" become a thing whose time has come and gone - maybe replaced with something else. Or at least, maybe a few players go by the wayside. Maybe it will even replaced with - dare I say it? - reality. But regardless of popularity, profitability will remain the big problem for many of these social media platforms. Even Facebook, with a 2016 P/E ratio of 40, is overpriced, even if it is profitable. Projections of future P/E ratios are, of course, speculation. Facebook might see a huge drop in stock price, if the P/E predictions turn out to be premature.

Then there is Toshiba. I sold my Southern Company stock, even though utility stocks are generally seen as safe, boring, investments. Southern Company owns Georgia Power, which is building two new nuclear plants here in Georgia. Toshiba bought Westinghouse, which was contracted to build these plants, (along with one in China and two in South Carolina). Like so many nuclear projects (e..g, Niagara Mohawk Nine Mile 2), the plants end up way over budget and behind schedule. At this point, Westinghouse is bankrupt, and Georgia Power is trying to figure out what to do - take over construction on its own, convert the plants to cheap natural gas? Or go bankrupt itself?

Meanwhile, Toshiba, once the powerhouse Japanese tech company, is facing bankruptcy itself, trying to sell off the jewel in the crown - its memory business - to pay for the disaster. Good thing seppuku is no longer in fashion in Japan! While nuclear power is really not "tech" related, it ends up taking down a tech company. A big tech company.

When these plants were designed and construction started, electrical costs were high and these nuclear plants appeared to be profitable ventures. Cheap natural gas ended up undercutting nuclear power, and cost overruns sealed the deal. While this may appear to be limited to something as minor and esoteric as the nuclear industry, think about how this will also impact solar and wind power. Again, will Musk be able to sell us on solar panels and storage batteries for our homes, when cheap electric power from natural gas floods the market? Stay tuned.

Of course, things will turn around eventually. Bankrupt Tesla might be bought up by one of the smaller car companies that can't afford the R&D to develop their own electric car. Oil prices will eventually go back up (they always do) which might send us back to the electric car drawing board (these things seem to go in cycles!). Crashes are always followed by recoveries.

But I am not sure that the euphoria about today's stock market is entirely justified. I mean, I made $20,000 last weekend, just sitting in my camper in Florida. I'll take the money, thanks. But I realize that volatility, particularly based on projected future growth and earnings is often a dangerous thing. What goes up, must come down. And it may be we see some down in the near future.

If you crank the numbers on this scam, you see it is just a redistribution of wealth.

This "Guaranteed Basic Income" thing is great for the media - it generates a lot of clicks. And some politicians are getting out in front of the "movement" as well. Some argue that it must be a good idea, as people from across the political spectrum - including some famous people - are in favor of it. The problem with that "argument" is that it is merely a credentialist argument. Mr. Smart Guy says it is a good idea, so it must be, as he is Mr. Smart guy! But history has shown that smart people do dumb things. Chelsea Clinton's Father-In-Law went to jail for stealing from his clients to send money to Nigeria when he was conned by some 21-year-old in a Nigerian Internet Cafe. Millions of dollars and jail time - and he was a "smart guy".

So that is not an argument - the fact a cockamamie idea is endorsed by a particular person or people. And in fact like all credentialist arguments, it is not an argument at all, but a way of shutting down argument and discussion, because you can't respond to a credentialist augment other than to say the "smart guy" making the argument is, in fact, an idiot. Never confuse getting lucky with being brilliant. We hang on the every word of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or that Zuckerberg kid, as if they have some great insight to the future of technology, when in reality, these were people mostly in the right place at the right time - smart enough to take advantage of opportunities dumped in their laps (unlike most of us) but hardly brilliant innovators who had a vision of the future.

A better approach than to say an idea is endorsed by celebrities is to examine the underlying idea itself. And if you "do the math" you quickly realize that doubling the national budget and giving away money in a wealth redistribution scheme are really not ideas that hold water or add up in a mathematical sense.

Suppose, for example, we could enact "guaranteed basic income" or "guaranteed minimum income" or whatever you want to call it. And let's say we give everyone $10,000 a year - an amount bandied about by proponents of this plan. How would this play out?

As I noted before, this comes to a whopping $3.15 trillion a year, which might be reduced to "only" $2 Trillion if we cancel social security and other entitlement programs (which would be a huge pay cut for those already on Social Security who would riot in The Villages if you tried to enact this- but let's take that aside for the moment).

Unless we want to borrow nearly 2/3 of the national budget every year, on top of what we already borrow, we'd have to raise taxes by $2 trillion dollars. Actually, since we would be abolishing the social security tax, we'd have to raise taxes by $3.15 trillion (not counting administrative costs for the plan!) after cutting the 16% self-employment tax and the 8% SS tax and 8% employer contribution. So we are basically doubling the annual budget which is today, about $3.8 trillion dollars or $12,000 per person as it is.

In order to do this, we would have to double the marginal rates to double tax revenue. Bear in mind we've dumped the social security tax (which only applied to the first $110,000 or so of income). So the 15% bracket becomes the 30% bracket, and the 25% bracket becomes the 50% bracket. And the 35% bracket becomes the 70% bracket. You see how this pans out - a huge tax increase for everyone.

But of course, the guy who was in the 15% bracket gets his $10,000, which is going to be about equal to his taxes, even at the 30% level. Say he and the wife are making $50,000 a year, which after deductions is $40,000 in taxable income. He pays roughly $10,000 in taxes, gets back $10,000 and has a net tax bill of ZERO. This is better than his previous bill of $6,000 to be sure - plus the social security and medicare taxes! So his net income after taxes is $40,000 a year. Since he no longer pays social security taxes, he comes out ahead by over $10,000. Who pays for this?

The guy who was in the 25% bracket, making $90,000 a year (married, filing jointly) maybe has a taxable income $80,000 after deductions. He pays at the marginal rate of 50% under the new plan, or roughly about $30,000. He gets $10,000 from the Federal government as his "guaranteed basic income" which means he nets $60,000 a year in income, or not much more than the guy making about half as much as he did. Consider under the current brackets, he would pay only $15,000 in taxes, and take home $65,000, and you can see he comes out about $5,000 behind. You are robbing the middle class to pay the lower classes. Do you think people will actually vote for this?

Now take the 35% bracket - now doubled to 70%. Say some "rich guy" (not really) is making $450,000 a year which is $400,000 after deductions. He now pays close to a whopping $250,000 a year in taxes, leaving him with $160,000 in income with his $10,000 "guaranteed minimum income." He is basically making little over twice what our friend in the 25% (now 50%) bracket was making, even though he was making over four times as much money. Do you think he will stand by and just take this?

The 25% bracket guy is subsidizing the 15% bracket guy, no matter how
you slice it. Our high-earner in the old 35% bracket is now paying for ten people to receive their $10,000 check from Uncle Sugar, which really is a check from your fellow citizens. This makes a lot of "sense" if you work as a burger flipper at a fast-food restaurant, less sense if you own the restaurant.

Now I rounded the numbers here for convenience. You can crank the numbers anyway you want. The bottom line is, you have to do the math on this, and no, you can't merely double the national budget and expect the money to just appear out of nowhere.

The big problem is that Americans would not stand for doubling the tax rates. And history has shown that if you raise tax rates high enough, you stifle the economy, which means you'd have to raise rates even higher or cut benefits or borrow even more. As you tax the economy to death, the economy will suffer, meaning less tax revenue. It becomes a vicious circle, raising rates to 70% even 90% (and even 100% in some countries)

The other huge problem with high tax rates is that when they get high enough, people spend more time avoiding taxes than actually working.When taxes get wacky, people go to great lengths to avoid paying them - legally - and thus spend useful work doing nothing of consequence. And usually, only the very rich can do this. They can afford to move to countries where taxes are lower, or register their boats and cars in places where there are no taxes.

Think I'm lying? When we lived in Alexandria, Virginia, which had an annual 4.5% property tax on cars, the rich folks living in houses with garages all had new Mercedes with District of Columbia tags on them. They registered their cars at their office address, and avoided paying thousands of dollars a year in car taxes. Meanwhile, the county would send cars through the low-income apartments to ticket people who didn't register their cars in Virginia and pay the taxes (yes, I got caught!). It became a poverty tax - enforced only against the poor and middle-class. The very rich just played games and avoided paying it.

Or like California's yacht tax. You have a big yacht, you register it in Mexico and leave it there for more than six months a year. The fishing is better in Baja anyway, right? Life is good. Meanwhile, the guy with the 26-foot family boat has to pay. He can't hire people to keep his boat in a foreign country. The poor pay, the rich get away. And this happens when you try to raise taxes in an uneven manner.

Or consider the staggering VAT or Value Added Tax they have in Europe. I had a friend who bought old Sea Ray boats, converted them to diesel power, and had them shipped to Europe on container ships. A SAS pilot ran the whole operation and sold the boats for a tidy profit in Sweden. Why? The VAT tax on a used boat was pretty low, but on a new boat, it was murder. What did this do to the Swedish boat building industry? It exported jobs to Fort Lauderdale, is what it did.

You can "tax the rich" all you want, they can afford to figure out ways not to pay - by incorporating, moving overseas, moving assets, registering in foreign countries, or whatever. All perfectly legal, too, and they can afford the overhead of accountants and lawyers.

Now some folks think we can raise this money by increasing the corporate income tax, or enacting trade tariff taxes, or a national sales tax, or whatever. Go ahead and figure out some sort of scheme, just remember you are doubling the national budget overnight with this idea, and you may have heard some inkling that balancing the existing budget has been very, very hard to do.

Bear in mind also that while $10,000 may seem like a "lot of money" (it isn't) today, it will quickly evaporate its earning power as inflation - which will rise as a result of this scheme - eats away at the earning power. So you quickly have to raise the "guaranteed basic income" to $12,000 then $15,000 and $20,000 and so on. You'll be carrying money to the bank in wheelbarrows before long, as inflation skyrockets - wiping out most of the country financially.

Sorry, but this idea is just plain insane. Giving away money sounds great if you are living in your parents' basement and smoking pot all day long. A lot of things sound great in that scenario, including ordering a pizza right about now. With chicken wings.

It is sad to me that people actually believe in this nonsense, and not just stoners in their parents' basements, but some silicon valley "visionaries" (hint: good time to sell their stock!) and people on both sides of the political spectrum.

Democracy fails when the plebes realize they can all vote themselves a raise - I think Heinlein said that. Once that happens, all bets are off. Fewer and fewer people will want to work or work hard, as the "reward" for working will only be to pay taxes to pay your fellow citizens.

Think of it this way, suppose you won the lottery and they took 90% of your winnings and gave it to everyone else who played the lottery that day? Would that be "fair"? Some would argue yes, as it evens out the outcome and redistributes the wealth and provides better income inequality.

But if the winning from playing $1 in the lottery, on millions-to-one odds, is, well, a dollar, than few people will bother playing anymore. Why bother when the best case scenario is you get your dollar back or worse case scenario is you get a few pennies?

Life is not the lottery, of course. It is less about "getting lucky" and more about "applying yourself". And when you apply yourself, you can become successful, and you might have a crazy idea at that point that decades of hard work that have paid off for you should not be spent on paying someone else.

If we remove the incentive to work, fewer people will work. And few people will find any incentive to start or run a business, invent, or create, if all the profits from their efforts are taken away in taxes and given to other people.

Our system already does this to a limited extent. But we triage who receives the money and make sure that the least possible is paid out. We limit what people can buy with food stamps, because quite frankly, they need that kind of guidance.

Whatever you perceive the "problems" in the world to be, throwing money at any problem is rarely, and in fact never, the correct answer. We spend more per capita on education in the District of Columbia than any other jurisdiction in the country - and still have some of the lowest test scores. What is needed isn't more money, but a better application of what money we are spending - plus new rules and regulations that allow teachers to teach and force students to learn, or leave.

These posited "nightmares" of massive unemployment and layoffs and "make-work" jobs have yet to materialize. In fact, we have record low unemployment at the present time, and millions of jobs going unfilled for lack of qualified candidates. The problem is already that we have too many incentives not to work and not enough incentives to work. Piling on a huge non-work incentive will just make things far worse.

This is an insane idea. And even more insane that "guaranteed basic income" is the idea that I would ever support this concept or be persuaded of it, after posting over 3,000 blog entries emphasizing personal responsibility in the world. Sorry, but no sale, just as I am not about to get all weepy about some asshole who refused to leave his seat on a plane (I see he got his payout - mission accomplished!).

What our country needs isn't more victim-mentality, but less of it. We have to stop feeling sorry for ourselves and for other people who put themselves in harms way and then claim to be "victims." It never works out very well for anyone involved.

Self-actualization is a far better path. Put down the bong and get back to work!

Friday, April 28, 2017

Note: Most science fiction stories do not very accurately portray the Patent system and how it works. This story, from 1955, was apparently written by a Patent Attorney, as it cites proper Rules and Law (for its era) and even relevant case law. Enjoy.

The Professional Approach

The trials of a patent lawyer are usually highly technical tribulations— and among the greatest is the fact that Inventors are only slightly less predictable than their Inventions!

by Leonard Lockhard

"Sometimes," said Helix Spardleton,
Esquire, "a patent case gets away
from you. As the attorney in the case,
you never quite see it the same as
everybody else. You stand isolated
and alone, unable to persuade the Patent
Examiners, the Board, the courts,
possibly even the inventor, to accept
your view of the case. Nothing you
do or say matches anyone else's thinking,
and you begin to wonder what's
the matter with everyone."

I nodded. This was my favorite
time of day. It was early evening in
Washington, D.C., and my boss, Helix
Spardleton, patent attorney extraordinary,
was relaxing. His feet
were up on one corner of his desk,
his cigar was in the Contemplation
Position, and the smoke curled slowly
toward the ceiling. His office was
a good room in which to relax. It was
filled with fine, old well-scratched
furniture, and the walls were lined
with books, and there was the comfortable
picture of Justice Holmes on
the wall looking down with rare approval
on what he saw. Susan, our
secretary, had made the last coffee of
the day, and had kicked off her shoes
the better to enjoy it. The three of us
just sat in the deepening dusk, and
talked. We didn't even turn on a
light. It was a shame I wasn't paying
close attention to Mr. Spardleton.

I said, "Yes, I know what you mean
about other people's not seeing things
the same way you do. I've seen something
like it at work with some of my
friends just before they get married.
They think their brides are just about
the most beautiful women in the
world, when they are really quite
homely—wouldn't even hold a candle
to our Susan here."

Mr. Spardleton looked at me and
then at Susan, and Susan looked at
him and then at me in that sober
wide-eyed way she has, and then they
looked at each other and smiled. I
guess they realized that I had said
something pretty funny.

Mr. Spardleton said, "I understand
why you think of the situation in
terms of brides, but I always think of
it in terms of a proud father who sees
nothing but perfection in his newborn
son."

"Yes," I said, "that's a good way to
put it, too."

"There are," he continued through
a cloud of gentle smoke, "two different
ways in which a patent case can
get away from the attorney. The first
doesn't happen very often, but when
it does it has a tendency to set the
world on fire. That's the case that has
true merit to it—high invention, if
you will—but the invention is so
subtle that nobody can see its importance.
Only the attorney who
wraps the case around his heart can
appreciate its vast potential. He goes
through the prosecution before the
Patent Office and possibly before the
courts shouting high praises of the
invention, but all the tribunals turn a
deaf ear. Sometimes the attorney
finally reaches Nirvana; the invention
comes into its own. It shakes the
world, just as the attorney had always
known it would."

I nodded and said, "Elias Howe
and his sewing machine, McCormick
and his reaper, Colt and his pistol."
Mr. Spardleton had taught me well.

"The other way is more common,"
he continued. "There the attorney
never sees the case in its true light.
He is blinded by something in it and
thinks it is greater than it is. He
wastes a lot of time trying to persuade
everybody that this very ordinary
invention is the wonder of the
decade. He thinks of the invention
the way a father does of a wayward
son—he sees none of its faults, only
its virtues, and he magnifies those."

I shifted into a more comfortable
position in my deep chair. Mr. Spardleton
must have thought I was going
to say something. He looked at me
and added hastily, "Or rather, as
you'd have it, the way a bridegroom
looks at his prospective bride. That
better?"

"Oh yes. Those fellows are really
blinded. They just can't see anything
the way it really is."

Mr. Spardleton said, "Most patent
attorneys are unable to tell the difference
between the two ways a case can
get away from them, once they get
caught in it. They always think that
nobody else agrees with them because
nobody else understands the case. It
is quite a blow when it turns out that
they are the one who has been wrong
all along. Yes, sometimes an understanding
of the facts is as difficult as
an understanding of the law."

"Yes," I said sleepily. "Sure must
be."

If I had known better that evening,
I would never have allowed myself
to get so sleepy. I should have
listened for the meaning in Mr.
Spardleton's words instead of merely
listening to the words themselves. I
have seen Patent Examiners act that
way—they hear the words, but the
meaning does not come through. We
locked the doors and went home,
then. How I wish I had listened!

Dr. Nathaniel Marchare is unquestionably
the greatest organic chemist
the world has seen since Emil Fischer.
His laboratories in Alexandria, Virginia,
constantly pour out a host of
exceedingly important inventions.
The chemists, physicists, physical
chemists, and biologists who work under
him are all dedicated men and
women, gifted with that scientific insight
that so often produces simple
solutions to great problems. Dr. Marchare
and his people are the principal
clients of the firm of Helix Spardleton,
Patent Attorney, and as such they
are very important to me. Nevertheless,
I always get a queasy feeling in
my stomach when Dr. Marchare excitedly
calls up Mr. Spardleton, and
Mr. Spardleton turns him over to me.

Dr. Marchare is a very nice person,
not at all mad as people are prone to
say. He is tall and gaunt and slightly
wall-eyed, and he seems to live in a
great, flopping laboratory smock, and
his hair is always wild, and he seems
to look around you rather than at you,
but he is a very nice person and not
at all mad. His main trouble is he
does not understand the workings of
the United States Patent System. After
I have explained to him the operation
of the Patent Law on some particular
situation, Dr. Marchare frequently
begins to mutter to himself
as if I were no longer in the same
room with him, and I find this most
discouraging. As if this were not bad
enough, many of Dr. Marchare's scientists
have acquired the same habit.

It was a bright fall morning when
this particular call came through. I
hadn't heard the phone ring, nor did
I hear Mr. Spardleton answer it in response
to Susan's buzz. But some sixth
sense brought me upright in my chair
when I heard Mr. Spardleton say,
"Well, how are things out in the
Washington suburbs this morning?"

I felt the hairs tingle at the base of
my neck, and I knew that Mr. Spardleton
was talking to Dr. Marchare.
I heard, "Certainly, why don't I send
Mr. Saddle out. He's worked with
Callahan before—on that Pigeon
Scarer Case, as I recall—and the two
of them can decide what to do. That
sound all right?"

I am afraid it sounded all right,
because there was some chitchat and
then the sound of the phone's banging
into its cradle, and Mr. Spardleton's
booming voice, "Oh, Mr. Saddle.
Will you come in here a moment,
please?"

I took a quick swallow of milk of
magnesia, an excellent antacid, and
went in. Mr. Spardleton was busy so
he came right to the point. "They've
got some kind of problem out at the
Marchare Laboratory—don't know
whether to file a patent application
right now, or wait until the invention
is more fully developed. Will you
hop out there and get them straightened
out? Callahan is the chemist,
and you know him pretty well."

I certainly did. Callahan's name always
reminded me of the time I took
testimony in Sing Sing Prison on a
Callahan application in Interference.
But I nodded numbly and went back
to my office and finished the bottle of
milk of magnesia and caught a cab
to the Marchare Laboratory.

It was cool in the lab and the air
smelled faintly of solvents. I liked
the smell, and I sniffed it deeply and
tried to distinguish one from the
other. My chemistry professor had
often told me that I had the best nose
he had run across in twenty-five years
of teaching. I picked out the pungent,
aromatic odor of toluene and
the hospital smell of diethyl ether,
and I thought I could detect the
heavy odor of lauryl alcohol. Underneath
them all was a rich, sweet smell
that I had smelled before, but I couldn't
tell what it was. I decided it was
a lactone, and let it go at that. I
nodded as I went past the receptionist,
and her smile made me feel uncomfortable
again, just as it always
did; there was too much of a leer in
it. I never stopped to tell her where
I was going; I just went in unannounced.

I went up the stairs and down the
hall to Callahan's lab, next to Dr.
Marchare's. I went in. Henry Callahan
stood at a bench pouring a colorless
liquid down a chromatographic
column. He looked over at me and
said, "Well, Carl Saddle. How are you,
man? Nice to see you."

Callahan was a big man, heavy-set,
with bright blue eyes, and a shock of
light-brown hair. For all his bulk he
moved lightly as befitted a former
stroke on the Penn crew. I was
fond of Callahan, even with all the
trouble his inventions caused me; I
knew he couldn't help it. I said,
"Hello Henry. How have you been?"
And we exchanged some more amenities.

Finally he said, "Carl, we have
quite a problem here, and we don't
know what to do about it. Here's the
situation."

I swallowed, and took out my notebook
and pencil, and laid my pocket
slide rule in front of me. I always
put the slide rule out where the inventor
can see it to remind him that
he is talking to another technical
man, not just a lawyer. This helps
make him stick to the facts. I didn't
need the rule with Callahan, but habit
is hard to break.

Callahan said, "Some time ago I
made a polyester, used adipic acid
and an amino alcohol. On a hunch I
dropped in an aluminum alkyl, and
then pushed the polymerization along
with both ultraviolet and heat. Got
a stiff gel out of the pot and drew it
into a quarter of a pound of fibers.
I only had time to determine that the
fibers were amorphous—no time to
draw them further to see if they
would develop crystallinity. I put them
in an open-mouth jar which I later
found had been used to store mercury.
One evening I took them out and
found they had developed crystallinity
on standing. Furthermore, the fibrous
ends had split, and the split ends
seemed to be tacky—seemed a natural
to me to make a sheet of paper
out of it."

I nodded as I worked furiously on
my notes. All of Marchare's people
talked that way. They did the most
fantastic things sometimes, and then
talked about them as if anyone would
have done the same thing. I had complained
about this oddity to Mr. Spardleton
when I first came to work for
him; I was used to inventions that
were made in understandable ways.
He had smiled and asked me to
quote the last sentence of 35 U.S.C.
103, the statute that set forth the
conditions for patentability. It was a
good thing I had memorized the
statute. I recited the last sentence,
"Patentability shall not be negatived
by the manner in which the invention
is made." Well, here it was again.

I asked Callahan, "Did you make a
sheet of paper out of it?"

"Sure did. Made a hand sheet in a
twelve-by-twelve inch mold. Pressed
it out, dried it, then got busy again
so I couldn't test it for a week. When
I did I started working nights to see
if I could duplicate my results. Just
finished this morning. Here's the
hand sheet, the second one."

He handed me a sheet of paper,
snow-white in color. I put aside my
pencil and notebook to examine it.
As I took it in my hand it was obvious
that it was something unusual.
It was softer than a cleansing tissue,
and probably even more flexible. I
rubbed it between my fingers, and it
had the most remarkable feel of any
paper I had ever felt—soft and clinging
and cool, and exceedingly pleasant.
I knew the paper chemists called
this property "hand." Callahan's paper
had the most remarkable hand I
had ever seen.

"Tear it in half," Callahan said.

I took the sheet between my thumbs
and forefingers and gingerly pulled,
expecting the light and soft sheet to
part easily. Nothing happened. I
pulled harder, and still nothing. I
smiled at Callahan, got a better grip,
and gave it a yank. Then I twisted
opposite corners around my fingers
and frankly pulled at it. The absurd
sheet refused to tear, and I realized
how ridiculous I must look to Callahan
to be unable to tear a flimsy sheet
of paper. I suppose I lost my temper a
little. I gathered as much of the paper
as I could in each hand, bent
over to put my hands on the inside
of my knees, and pulled until I heard
my back muscles crack. I let out my
breath explosively and looked helplessly
at Callahan.

He said, "Don't feel bad, Carl. Nobody
has been able to tear it."

"You mean it?" I asked. I found
myself puffing; I had not realized I
was straining so hard.

"Yup. That paper has a tensile of
2,800 pounds per square inch, and a
tear strength equally unbelievable."

I looked at the little sheet and
great possibilities began to occur to
me. "Clothing," I said. "Great heavens,
think what this will do for the
clothing industry. No more weaving.
Just run this stuff off on a paper machine
at five hundred feet per minute."
I stopped and looked at Callahan
and said, "You will be able to
make it on a paper-making machine,
won't you?"

"As far as I know."

"Good," I said. "When can we try
it in the pilot plant."

"Well, that's where the problem
comes in, Carl. I have to leave for the
West Coast tomorrow, and I'll be
gone for six months. There's nobody
else around here to take it through the
pilot plant. What's worse, one of my
technicians left this morning to take
a job with Lafe Rude Consultants,
Inc., up in Boston. The technician is
an ethical man, and all that, but I'm
afraid the word will be out on this
paper now."

My heart sank. Callahan said, "I've
already started another of my technicians,
John Bostick, on the process to
make certain he can repeat my work.
But that's all we can do for a few
months around here. The laboratories
have never been so busy. What do
you think we ought to do?"

The answer was obvious. "We've
got to file a patent application right
away. It isn't ready to file, but we've
got to do it anyway."

Callahan said, "Oh, we're in good
shape. We know it works."

I nodded and said, "What acids
other than adipic will work?"

"Oh, azoleic, sebacic, a few others,
I suppose."

"What else other than amino alcohols?
What other catalysts? Do you
really need mercury vapor? Will some
other metallic vapor do? What about
temperature variations in making the
polyester? How long a cure time?
How much ultraviolet? Will the fibers
be better if you draw them more?
Can you get those tacky fiber ends in
any other way? Can you improve
them? What about the sheet-making
conditions? Does oxygen in the air
catalyze...?"

Callahan held up his hands and
said, "O.K., O.K., we don't know anything
about it. But we're not going to
find out these things until we open
a research program, and we can't open
a program for at least six months.
In the meantime that technician may ..."

I held up my hands this time, and
he fell quiet. We stood silently until
I asked, "All the information in your
notebooks, Henry?"

He nodded, and I continued, "Well,
I'll be back tomorrow to talk to you
and Bostick. We'll just have to file a
patent application on what we have."

We chatted a while about his work
on the West Coast, and then we shook
hands and I left. I had a few moments
to think in the cab before I
talked with Mr. Spardleton. Here I
was in that situation that a patent
attorney dreads. I had an incomplete
invention, one that required a great
deal of work before it could be filed,
yet I had to file now in the incomplete
condition. With it all, here was
a most significant invention, one that
would make the world take notice.
This was one of the rare ones, I could
feel it in my bones. It was obviously
an industry-founder, a landmark invention
on a par with the greatest,
even in its incomplete condition. By
golly, I was going to do a job on this
one.

Mr. Spardleton was in a bad mood
when I entered his office. I didn't
have a chance to say a thing before he
bellowed at me, "Mr. Saddle, do you
know what a plasticizer is?"

"Why, ah, yes. It is a material, generally
a solvent, that softens and
renders another material more flexible."

"That's right." His fist banged on
the desk. "Yet here," he waved an
Office Action at me, "is an Examiner
who says that the term 'plasticizer' is
indefinite, and I must give a list of
suitable plasticizers when he knows
that Rule 118 forbids me to put in
such a list. Can you imagine? He is
saying in effect that a chemist who
works with synthetic resins does not
know what a plasticizer is, and I must
take him by the hand and teach him
something he learned in freshman
chemistry. It has nothing to do with
the invention, either. I am claiming
a new kind of lens holder, and I point
out that the interior of the holder
may be coated if desired with a plasticized
synthetic resin coating. My, I
don't know what the Office is coming
to. The Patent Office is the only institution
in the world that does not
know the meaning of the phrase
'room temperature'. Some day....
What's the matter, Mr. Saddle?"

I had pulled up a chair and
hunched down in it. Mr. Spardleton
recognized the symptoms. He put
down the offending Office Action
and settled back and waited for me to
tell him my troubles.

I said, "I've got a hot invention. It
is a paper that will replace cloth,
strong, flexible, cheap too. We've only
made one version of it, though, and
I have to file an application right
away because one of Callahan's technicians
left, and we can't risk waiting."

He nodded, and I went on, describing
to him all the details of the
invention and the situation. When I
finished I stared morosely at the floor.
Mr. Spardleton said, "What's the problem?
File a quick application now,
and later on when you have more information,
abandon it and file a good,
full-scale application."

I looked at him in surprise and
said, "But somebody else has just as
much information as we have, and he
may start to experiment right away.
That technician knows as much as we
do. In another six months they could
file a complete application and beat
us out on dates; they'd be first with
the complete application."

"Well, what do you propose to do
about it?"

I shrugged. "I'll have to make up as
good an application as I can right
now. We'll make some guesses at how
the research would go, and put it in."

"Oh now, look. You don't know"—he
began ticking off the points on his
fingers—"if you really need the trialkyl
aluminum, or the mercury-treated
glass surface, or the heat, or the radiation,
or any combination of them.
You don't have any idea of the conditions
that are necessary to produce
this paper."

"I know."

"All you've got is a single example
that works. If you make your claims
broader than that one example, the
Examiner will reject you for lack of
disclosure. This is basic in patent
law. Ex parte Cameron, Rule 71, and
35 U.S.C. 112 will do for a starter."

But I hadn't worked with Mr. Spardleton
for nine years for nothing,
and he had taught me how to play
this game pretty well. I sat up
straighter in my chair and said, "Yes,
but in Ex parte Dicke and Moncrieff
the disclosure of nitric acid as a
shrinking agent for yarns was enough
to support a claim for shrinking
agents broadly; the claim did not
have to be limited to nitric acid."

"Only because nitric acid was already
known to be a shrinking agent
for yarns."

I said, "Well, adipic acid is a known
polyester ingredient."

"And all the other ingredients?"

I did then what he had carefully
taught me to do when I was losing an
argument: I quickly shifted to another
point. "In Ex parte Tabb the applicant
merely disclosed raisins and
raisin oil, but that was enough to
support claims to 'dried fruit' and
'edible oil'."

"But in that case the Board of Appeals
said they allowed such terminology
only because the equivalency of
the substances could be foreseen by
those skilled in the art, foreseen with
certainty, too. Can you say that about
your substances?"

I hesitated before I answered, and
that was all he needed to take over.
"A large number of ingredients was
recited in In re Ellis, and since there
was no evidence to show that they all
would not work, the applicant was
allowed broad claims. But you'd have
trouble making your guessed-at ingredients
stick. In the case of Corona
Cord Tire Company v. Dovan, the
court said the patentee was entitled
to his broader claims because he
proved he had tested a reasonable
number of the members of a chemical
class. Have you?"

I started to answer, but Mr. Spardleton
was in full swing now, and he
said to me, "No, sir, you haven't. You
are not ready to put in broad claims
on a half-baked invention."

It was the "half-baked" that did it.
Controlling my temper I rose to my
feet and said in a purposeful, quiet
voice, "I think I see clearly how this
case should be handled in this situation.
I shall prepare it in that manner,
and file it, and prosecute it, and obtain
a strong patent on a pathfinder
invention. I'll keep you posted." I
turned and walked out. Just as I
passed through the door I thought I
heard him say softly, "Attaboy, Carl,"
but I must have been mistaken. Mr.
Spardleton never calls me Carl.

I got right at it the very next morning.
I opened the office myself and began
studying my notes to see how
broad a claim I could write for the
Tearproof Paper Case. I listed all the
ingredients in one column, and then
filled up the adjacent columns with
all the possible substitutes I could
think of. I didn't even know it when
Susan arrived at the office, stood in
my doorway for a moment, and then
tip-toed away. Later on Mr. Spardleton
looked in on me, and I wasn't
aware of that, either. It was ten o'clock
before I finally came up for air, and
then I dashed out to the Marchare
Laboratory for another talk with Callahan.
I explained how I was going to
handle the case to make sure we got a
good, broad patent application into
the Patent Office.

"Can you do that?" he asked.

"Oh, yes. We can put in all the
things we think will work, but if we
are wrong we are in some degree of
trouble. But I feel that with both of
us working on this we ought to be
able to turn out a good sound job.
I'll keep sending you drafts out in
San Francisco until we finally get one
we think good enough to file. But
we can't waste time. This is a hot one,
and we want to get it in as soon as
possible."

He shrugged his shoulders, and we
sat down to work on my lists. Neither
one of us realized it when lunch time
came and went. But that's the way it
is with world-beater inventions; they
sweep you along. Early that afternoon
I dictated my first draft to Susan.
Callahan and I went over the draft,
and then he left for San Francisco.
The next time around we had to use
air mail. With each new draft we added
more to the basic information we
had, rounding out the invention in
ever greater detail. I added example
after example, being careful to state
them in the present tense; I did not
want to give the impression that the
examples had actually been run.

In a month's time I checked with
John Bostick. Bostick had been able
to duplicate Callahan's work, and we
had three more, flimsy, diaphanous
sheets that could not be torn
by human hands. That was all I
needed. Now I knew that anyone
could duplicate the Tearproof Paper,
and I had at least one, good, substantial
working example for my patent
application. The knowledge gave me
greater confidence in the alternate
materials and procedures that Callahan
and I had dreamed up. I prepared
a final draft containing twenty-three
pages of detailed specification and
eleven examples and topped it all off
with forty-six claims. It was a magnificent
application, considering what
I had to start with. I handed it to Mr.
Spardleton and sat down to hear
what he had to say about it.

I watched him out of the corner of
my eye as he read it, and I had the
pleasure of seeing his cigar slowly
swing outward until the glowing end
was almost beneath one of his ears.
This, I knew, was his Amazed Position,
and it was rare indeed that I or
anyone else ever saw it. Mr. Spardleton
was a man who does not amaze
easily.

He finished and looked up at me
and said, "I assume this is the same
invention you told me about last
month?" When I nodded he continued,
"And I further assume that you
have no experimental data in addition
to that you described last month?"
Again I nodded, and he said, "All of
this is paperwork with the exception
of Example I?" I nodded again, and
he put the draft down in front of him
and stared at it.

I began to grow uncomfortable in
the silence. Then he said, so softly
that I could hardly hear him, "I remember,
many, many years ago, answering
the phone, Cliff Norbright—great
chemist—telling me he had
smelled phenol when he heated ethylene
chlorohydrin in the presence of
holmium-treated silica gel in a test
tube. I wrote the greatest patent application
of the age based on that
evidence. Just like this one." He laid
a hand on it, and shook his head, and
smiled.

"There is no crude guesswork on
this product," I said. "The work has
been duplicated, and I've seen many
specimens of this paper. I tell you,
sir, there never has been anything
like it. Why, even Callahan ..."

"Yes, tell me about Dr. Callahan.
He is usually a pretty conservative
fellow. How does he feel about this
completely untried product?"

I sat up straighter. "This is not an
untried product, Mr. Spardleton. It
has been made and duplicated. It has
all the properties that the application
says it has. And Dr. Callahan has just
as much faith in it as I have."

Mr. Spardleton looked at me, and
smiled, and slowly handed over the
draft. "Mr. Saddle, I wish you all the
best in your prosecution of this case.
Please call on me if there is anything
I can do to help. In any way, don't
hesitate to call on me."

I stood up and took the draft and
turned to go, but Mr. Spardleton
thrust his hand out. I shook it and
said, "Is anything wrong with it?"

"Not that I am able to see, Mr.
Saddle. It is a most remarkable job,
and bespeaks of ingenuity, resourcefulness,
and skill. You have come a
long way to be able to write such an
application."

I didn't know what to say, so I
smiled and bobbed my head and
walked out still looking at him and
smiling, which made it necessary for
me to walk sideways, and thus made
me look, I suppose, somewhat like a
crab.

Susan put the case in final form.
We sent the papers to California for
Callahan's signature, then we filed
the case, and things got back to normal
with me. It was a great relief not
to have the strain on me night and
day. That's the trouble with an important
case. You live with it too
much.

It was seven months before I got
the first Office Action in the Case. I
read the first few paragraphs and they
were quite normal. They rejected the
Case in the usual manner by citing
prior patents that had nothing to do
with my application. This kind of
thing was just part of the game of
prosecution in which the Patent Examiner
makes rejections because that
is what he is supposed to do no matter
what the invention; they don't
have to make much sense. But then
came a paragraph that went way beyond
good sense and proper rejection
technique. It said:

The specification is objected to as
containing large portions that are
merely laudatory. See Ex parte Grieg,
181 OG 266, and Ex parte Wellington
113 OG 2218. These portions are
superfluous and should be deleted,
Ex parte Ball, 1902 CD 326. The
specification is unnecessarily prolix
throughout and contains an unduly
large number of embodiments, Ex
parte Blakemen, 98 OG 791. Shortening
is required.

I didn't wait. I grabbed the file of
the Case and almost ran over to the
Patent Office to straighten out the
Examiner on a few things. As usual,
Herbert Krome was the Examiner,
so I charged up to his desk and immediately
began explaining to him the
importance of the Tearproof Paper
Case. He seemed to pay no attention
to me, but I knew him; he was listening.
When I finally paused to let him
say something, he looked at me quizzically
and said, "Mr. Saddle, aren't
you aware of the Notice of October
11, 1955?"

I looked at him blankly and said,
"What's that?"

"It says that interviews with Examiners
are not to be held on Fridays
except in exceptional circumstances."

I gulped and said, "Is today Friday?"

He pushed his desk calendar toward
me. It was Friday all right, and
the thirteenth at that. I was too embarrassed
to speak, and I got up and
began to walk out. Mr. Krome called
after me. "This must be an important
case, Mr. Saddle. I'll expect to see you
the first thing Monday." I nodded,
and left.

By Monday, my embarrassment had
not diminished. I had really done an
unheard-of thing in patent prosecution.
In patent prosecution, the patent
attorney has six months to respond
to an Office Action. Since attorneys
carry a docket of cases adapted
to fill all their time, an attorney in
most instances requires the full six
months to respond to an outstanding
Office Action. Industrious attorneys
with relatively light dockets might
respond in five months' time. This
may also happen when the attorney
is trying to get a little ahead so he
can go on a vacation. There are rare
instances of record when an attorney
had taken some action in three or
four months. But here, in the Tearproof
Paper Case, I had actually gone
for an interview on the very first
day. I couldn't possibly go back on the
following Monday; my pride would
not allow me. I waited until Tuesday.

By that time I had gone over the
entire rejection and planned my complete
response to the Examiner. I sat
down with Mr. Krome on Tuesday
morning and talked steadily for fifteen
minutes before I realized he was
watching me instead of paying attention
to the case. I said, "What's the
matter."

He said wonderingly, "I've never
seen you like this before. You are
acting almost as unreasonably as an
inventor. You don't even want to
hear what I have to say about this
case. You should relax, Mr. Saddle.
You are here as an advocate, not as
a midwife."

"I don't think that's very funny,
Mr. Krome," I proceeded to explain
the high merit of the case, and he
seemed to listen then. Before I left
he promised to give the case careful
consideration. This was all he ever
promised, so I thanked him and went
back to my office. I filed my amendment
in the case the next day. It was
eight months before I got the next
Office Action.

Callahan returned in six months
and immediately opened a project on
the Tearproof Paper. The two of us
sat down together to determine the
best way to handle the research.

I said, "Henry, we have already
drawn up a complete research program.
All we have to do is follow it."

"We have?" Callahan was surprised.

"Sure." And I laid out in front of
him a copy of our patent application,
and riffled through its pages. "All we
have to do is go through all the examples
here to make certain they all
work. If they do, the program will be
complete, except for the product
itself and commercial production. Our
patent application will make the best
research guide we could get."

"Why certainly," said Callahan.
"We have already spent a great deal
of time working out all kinds of substitute
and equivalent reactions. It's
all here. Good. I'll set it up."

Callahan began distributing the
work to various groups, and I went
back to my office. Every Friday afternoon
thereafter I went out to the
laboratories to see how things were
coming along. They came along well.
From the beginning the actual results
reached by the research teams
matched the predictions we had made
in our patent application. At the Friday
afternoon meetings Callahan and
I got into the habit of tossing pleased
and knowing glances at each other as
the streams of data continued to confirm
our work. Several months rolled
happily by. Then came a letter from
the Lafe Rude Consultants, Inc., up in
Boston. The letter said that their people
understood that the Marchare Laboratories
had under development a remarkably
strong paper, and they
would be very much interested in discussing
licensing possibilities with us.
I grabbed the letter and stormed into
Mr. Spardleton's office.

"Just read this," I almost yelled as
I handed him the letter. "This is the
outfit that hired Callahan's technician.
Now they know all about the Tearproof
Paper. That technician has told
them everything. I think we ought to
sue them—inducing disclosure of
trade secrets, or something." I added
a great deal more as Mr. Spardleton
finished the letter and sat holding it
looking up at me as I paced back and
forth in front of his desk. As I walked
and talked, I finally became conscious
of the fact that Mr. Spardleton was
waiting for me to finish; I could tell
by the expression on his face. I pulled
up in front of him and fell quiet.

He said, "Don't you feel it is significant
that this letter was sent to
us, lawyers for Marchare Laboratories,
rather than direct to the Laboratories?"

I thought about it, and he continued,
"Furthermore, as I understand
it, the Lafe Rude people have a good
reputation."

That was right, too, and I saw what
he was driving at. People of good
reputation don't try to pull a fast one
by immediately alerting the lawyers
for the other side. In fact, when I
stopped to think about it, I could see
that they were bending over backwards
to be careful in this situation.

Mr. Spardleton said, as he handed
back the letter, "I suggest you clear
with Dr. Marchare, and then make
arrangements to talk to these people
and see if you can negotiate some
kind of profitable license. Marchare
is pretty fully committed right now,
and I don't think he has time to exploit
this paper, even if it turns out to
amount to something."

I looked at him, aghast that he
should still be doubtful of the paper
at this late stage of the game. He saw
my look and said, "Oops, I mean this
milestone in paper technology once
it is announced to the world."

That seemed better, more to the
point. I called Dr. Marchare and
found that Mr. Spardleton was right,
as usual. Dr. Marchare would welcome
a beneficial licensing arrangement. I
then called the Rude Associates on
the phone; it seemed more expeditious
than writing. I set up a meeting
date as soon as possible, one week
away.

The day before I left for Boston I
checked in with Callahan to make
certain all of our data were correct.
We went over every aspect of the
Tearproof Paper Case. I picked out a
dozen good samples of the paper of
varying composition and thickness
and put them in my briefcase along
with a copy of the patent application.
I had decided that I might even show
them a copy of the application if it
might help show what a marvelous
discovery we had made. Callahan and
I shook hands solemnly, and he wished
me the best of luck. I went back to
my office for a final quick check, got
interested in Zabell's book, and went
home without my briefcase. There
was no harm done. My plane did not
leave until ten in the morning and I
had planned to go back to the office
anyway. I said good-by to Susan and
Mr. Spardleton, retrieved my briefcase
from over by the radiator where
Susan had put it the night before,
and caught the plane.

It was a cold damp day, and the
threat of rain was in the air. In Boston
I caught a cab for the Massachusetts
Avenue laboratories of Rude
Associates. Dr. Rude himself was at
the meeting, along with half a dozen
of his associates. Dr. Rude was a small
man, dapper, totally unlike a research
chemist, and his speech and manner
were as impeccable as his dress. Only
his hands were a giveaway; they were
stained with yellow and black stains
that looked completely out of place
on the man. Dr. Rude opened the
meeting with an explanation concerning
the technician he had hired from
the Marchare Laboratories two years
earlier. "Just a week ago," said Dr.
Rude, "we put him on a problem of
paper chemistry. He told us that the
properties we sought—and more—had
already been found by your laboratory.
He said no more, and we
would not have allowed him to say
any more, except that you were the
patent lawyer who was working on
the case. That is all we know about it.
We hope you have something of mutual
interest, but we don't know any
more than what I have told you."

I said, "Thank you, Dr. Rude. I understand
how it was. I assure you it
never crossed our minds down in
Washington that anything could
have been out of line in any manner
whatsoever."

The assembled group smiled, and I
smiled back, and we all felt friendly
with one another. Dr. Rude cleared
his throat and said, "Well, is there
anything you can tell us about this
tearpr ... about a paper having
some of these very interesting properties?"

I said, "There is a great deal I can
tell you about the paper we have, but
suppose I let you see some specimens
before I say anything. There's nothing
like the actual goods themselves
to do most of the talking."

We all laughed as I took half a
dozen twelve-by-twelve hand sheets
out of my briefcase and passed them
around the table. I watched the chemists
finger the sheets, savoring their
soft coolness, and I heard the whispered
comments, "good hand," "excellent
softness," "fine color," and a few
others. Dr. Rude said, "Are these
'breaking samples', Mr. Saddle? Do
you mind if we tear them?"

Well, you can see that this was the
question I was waiting for. I sat back
and allowed a slight smile to play over
my face. I said, "Oh no, gentlemen.
Go ahead and tear them."

I saw several of the people take the
sheets between their thumbs and
forefingers, and gently pull. I saw the
sheets tighten momentarily, and then—as
if the sheets were no more than
ordinary cleansing tissue—I saw the
fibers pull apart as each man easily
tore the sheet in half.

I felt the blood drain from my
face, and it seemed to me that my
pounding heart must have been visible
right through my clothes. I swallowed
and tried to say something, although
I had no clear idea of what I
was going to say. Words would not
come. I leaned over and took another
sheet from my briefcase and tugged
at it. It tore in half with practically
no effort. I took another, same results,
and still another. I dimly realized
that all the people at the meeting
were staring at me, but I wasn't
concerned. I knew something must
be wrong with all the specimens;
possibly I had placed regular cleaning
tissues in my briefcase, or maybe Susan
... but even as I thought it I
knew such a mistake was impossible.

I reached over and tried tearing
one of the sheets I had passed out to
the others. It tore into quarters as
easily as it had torn into halves. That
finished me. I leaned back and looked
around at the silent group and wondered
what Mr. Spardleton would
have said at a time like that. I started
to smile and discovered that my original
smile was still frozen on my face.
I stood up and began retrieving the
torn papers; they passed them back
to me without saying anything. I replaced
them in my briefcase, closed it,
said, "Gentlemen, Christmas falls on
Friday this year," and walked out.

It was raining outside, but I scarcely
noticed. I hailed a cab to the Logan
Airport, changed my reservations
to an earlier plane, and returned to
Washington. It was a slow trip. The
planes were stacked up in the rain at
the Washington International Airport,
but I did not notice the passage
of time. I was too stunned to think
clearly, but I kept trying. I got quite
wet in Washington, but I was in a
hurry to see Mr. Spardleton and I did
not bother to change my clothes.

I burst into his office. He looked
up and said, "Well, I didn't expect to
see you until tomorrow. How did...?"
He saw my face.

I plopped my briefcase on his desk
and pulled out all the specimens and
dumped them in front of him. I said,
"Just look at these. This 'Tearproof
Paper' has deteriorated. These specimens
are useless. Right in front of
all the Rude chemists, they go bad.
Most of them are new ones, too. How
can this be possible? Just look at
them."

Mr. Spardleton picked up one of
the sheets, rubbed it, and then tugged
at it gently to tear it. It did not tear.
He pulled harder, and then harder,
and it did not tear. I stared at him in
disbelief and said, "Oh, Mr. Spardleton,
this is no time to play games
with me."

I took one of the sheets and yanked
it, and almost cut my fingers. I bent
over and put my hands on my knees
to get better leverage just as I had
the very first time, but the sheet
would not tear. I threw it on the desk
and tried another with the same results.
One after another I ran through
them all while Mr. Spardleton sat
back and watched me. I was wild-eyed
when I finished.

Mr. Spardleton said, "Mr. Saddle,
would you mind telling me what has
happened?"

I pulled up a chair, groped for my
voice, and finally got the story out.
He looked at me strangely, tried to
tear another of those miserable little
sheets, and said, "Mr. Saddle, do you
feel all right?"

In Boston I had been completely
deflated and bewildered, but now I
was mad. I grabbed up the phone
and called Callahan. I had barely
started to pour out the story when he
said, "I'm glad you called, Carl. We
seem to have run into something on
this paper thing. Looks bad. Can you
come out?"

"Be right there." I hung up.

Mr. Spardleton went out with me;
he didn't want me to go anywhere
alone. Callahan was holding two
sheets up to the light when we went
into his lab. He said, "Two identical
sheets, except for the moisture content.
Moisture is the devil. One of
these is dry, the other contains three
per cent moisture. Here's the dry
one." He tore it in half effortlessly.
"Here's the moist one." And he
strained at it, but it would not tear.
"We just ran across this effect last
night, and finished checking it out an
hour ago. Have you been to Rude
Associates yet?"

I nodded.

"Too bad. We'll have to show them
what can happen."

Mr. Spardleton said, "They already
know."

Callahan said, "This kicks the
whole thing in the head. The paper
can never be more than a laboratory
curiosity, as far as we can see. The
sun, a dry climate, heat, any of these
things will drive off the moisture,
and the paper will lose its strength.
There's no way we can market a product
like that when it might lose its
strength at any time. I'm afraid the
'Tearproof Paper' must join the huge
list of fine products that can't be sold
because of one small flaw."

It was Mr. Spardleton who steered
me out of the labs. He slipped an
arm through mine and said, "You
can refile the patent application and
add this information about the moisture
content. You ought to get the
patent without too much trouble
even if the product is of no commercial
value."

I nodded as we stood in the rain
waiting for a cab.

He said, "I never told you what
happened in that Phenol Case of
mine many years ago. It turned out
that the man at the next bench had
spilled a little phenol on the bench
top. That's what my inventor smelled;
there never was any phenol in the test
tube. We all fall over the facts of a
case now and then." He squeezed my
arm, and the rain did not seem to fall
quite as hard.

* * *

Thomas, Theodore, L

(1920-2005) US author and lawyer, prolific in the magazines under his
own name, which he sometimes rendered as Ted Thomas, and as Leonard
Lockhard, the pseudonym he used for his Patent Attorney spoof series (eight stories 1952-1964 in Astounding/Analog), some of which were with Charles L Harness, including The Professional Approach (September 1962 Analog; 2007 ebook). He had begun publishing work of genre interest with two simultaneous stories, "The Revisitor" for Space Science Fiction in September 1952, and "Improbable Profession" for Astounding in September 1952 as by Leonard Lockard with Charles L Harness,
and appeared frequently in the magazines until 1981 with tales
competently designed for their markets, the most effective perhaps being
those, like "The Weather Man" (June 1962 Analog), set on a future Earth dominated by a Weather Control Board (see Weather Control). With Kate Wilhelm he wrote two novels, The Clone (December 1959 Fantastic as by Thomas alone; much exp 1965) and The Year of the Cloud (1970), both featuring unnatural Disasters. The eponymous menace in the first novel represents a rare use in sf of what is a Clone in the strict biological sense; the interstellar cloud into which the Earth plunges in the second turns water to gelatin.

The point is, Shelia lies to her doctor, often by not telling him the whole story - a lie by omission. Or if she does tell the story, it is only a half-story, slanted in a particular way. It is hard to be honest with ourselves, much less honest about ourselves to others, even in the confessional-like atmosphere of a doctor's office.

It struck me re-reading this that I had been misunderstanding perhaps one of the most famous quotes in Shakespeare:

Polonius:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell, my blessing season this in thee!

Polonius has in mind something much more Elizabethan than the
New Age self-knowledge that the phrase now suggests. As Polonius
sees it, borrowing money, loaning money, carousing with women ofdubious character, and other intemperate pursuits are "false" to
the self. By "false" Polonius seems to mean "disadvantageous" or
"detrimental to your image"; by "true" he means "loyal to your own
best interests." Take care of yourself first, he counsels, and thatway you'll be in a position to take care of others. There is wisdom
in the old man's warnings, of course; but he repeats orthodoxplatitudes with unwonted self-satisfaction. Polonius, who is deeply
impressed with his wordliness, has perfected the arts of protecting
his interests and of projecting seeming virtues, his method of
being "true" to others. Never mind that this includes spying on
Hamlet for King Claudius. Never mind, as well, that many of
Polonius's haughty, if not trite, kernels of wisdom are now taken
as Shakespeare's own wise pronouncements on living a proper
life.

That's another take that makes more sense. I think many others, including myself at one time, took the "new age self-knowledge" aspect of it, as it was bandied about and appears on plaques and t-shirts in recent years. I used to think this meant being "true" to your beliefs, ideals, and principles. But the other alternative, of taking care of yourself as part of the unwritten social contract, is something I see today.

But in terms of being "true" to yourself, perhaps the meaning is deeper than Polonius or the website above considers. It literally means not lying to yourself. If you tell yourself lies ("I'm not that fat", "It's not that expensive", "I can afford to lease a new SUV") you will end up acting to your own detriment. Most of the world's problems today are caused not by people lying to each other, but by people lying to themselves.

Or put more succinctly, to lie to someone else, you have to first lie to yourself.

This goes back to externalizing, which I harp on a lot here. People love to lie to themselves and the first lie they tell themselves is that their situation in life is the fault of other people, preferably unseen or anonymous forces beyond their control. I'm not fat because I eat too much, it's the high-fructose corn syrup they put in the food! I'm not broke because I spent all my money - someone took it all away from me! And so on and so forth down the line. If your "life plan" requires major overhauls to society, government, human nature, or our economic system, the problem isn't them, it's you.

When we say that our situation in life wasn't based at least in part on our life choices, we are indeed lying to ourselves. This lie, even a trivial one, is dangerous in that it excuses us from making better life choices down the road. To thine own self, be true!

Several people have written me saying that "guaranteed minimum income" will be necessary in the future as robots and "AI" take over all of our jobs. I think this is a little over-stated to say the least. Jobs have disappeared when technology made them obsolete, and this has been going on for decades now - centuries even. Somehow we all manage to find something to do.

Of course, it may not be at the pay level you'd like, but then again, no one is ever satisfied with how much money they make, no matter what the pay level. And that is no excuse to take money from other people, which is all "guaranteed minimum income" is all about. In order for "everyone" to get $10,000 each, some folks are going to have to pay $40,000 more in taxes, maybe hundreds of thousands more. But I digress.

The "threat" of robotics and "AI" is overstated in the press, which is staffed by a bunch of liberal-arts know-nothings, well, at least know-nothings with regard to technology. All this talk about "AI" crap is a case in point. Computers are not anywhere near from becoming sentient beings. Our most sophisticated computer in the world - or even all of them put together, doesn't have the computing power of a grasshopper, much less a mouse.

It is like the colonization of space argument - people with no technical background think you can just go to Mars and start farming potatoes and everything will work out OK - hey we all saw the movie, right? But the reality of trying to build every damn thing you need without the huge resources in air, water, and not to mention oil, is staggering.

The "AI" of today is really just primitive programs designed to use keywords to search for data online, not actually "think" about your question and formulate an answer. And yes, some such programs might pass a "Turing test" and appear to be sentient, but of course, they are not. Not just yet, anyway. Not for a good long time.

But alarmist headlines sell newspapers or more precisely generate ratings and click-though revenue. So the media, staffed by said aforementioned clueless "communications" or liberal arts majors, who think their smart phone is smarter than they are (and half the time is) spout these "robots are taking over the world and we'll all be out of a job!" headlines. Well, we can only hope they'll be out of a job, anyway, given the drivel that passes for "journalism" these days.

But what about robotic cars? Trucks? Airplanes? Won't these things throw millions out of work? Where will convicted felons go for work if they can't drive a truck? If taxicabs have no drivers, what will immigrants with no language skills or sense of direction do for a living? And who will stall the airplane if we don't have pilots?

All kidding aside, there are a number of technical hurdles - and social ones - before autonomous vehicles take to the highways. The latter is more of the problem. One of the first Patents I wrote as a law clerk (nearly 30 years ago) was on autonomous vehicles. That Patent, for a research division related to Toyota (IMRA) used lidar to detect the presence of retro-reflectors on the highway to determine whether the vehicle was in its lane or not.

As part of this case, I had to research all the activity on autonomous vehicles, and I was surprised that it went back as far as the 1970's, funded by the highway administration. The University of Pittsburgh, as I recall, was an early experimenter, using a box truck loaded with computers to slowly drive across campus. On a good day, they hit only two or three students. I'm just kidding of course, but the idea is not new, and the government has been pushing this technology for decades.

And the reason why is not hard to fathom. About 40,000 people are killed on the highways every year - about the same number as die of breast cancer. We all have "awareness" about breast cancer, and telethons and fund raisers, and pink ribbons. But there is little awareness of the carnage on the highways, other than MADD which wants to put an end to about half of these deaths, which are caused by drunk drivers.

Some Luddites posit that if we go to autonomous vehicles, computer glitches or hardware errors could lead to spectacular accidents - where dozens of cars are involved in high-speed pileups on the freeway, killing large numbers of people. And I suspect this will happen, just as airliners routinely fall out of the sky (often due to pilot error) and kill hundreds at a time. But the overall carnage rate will be far less with autonomous vehicles than with human-driven ones, if you can call what humans do these days (eating, drinking, texting, having sex) "driving" in the normal sense. And since such accidents will have "deep pockets" in the form of the technology companies that make the hardware and software that failed, it will be a lot easier to recover damages, as opposed to going after individual insurance companies.

The problem, of course, is what happens in an environment where there is a mixture of autonomous vehicles and human-driven ones? We are seeing already that humans can cause autonomous vehicles to get into a wreck, as people behave in irrational and unpredictable ways. Suppose people intentionally act in irrational ways?

For example, you've seen these videos on YouTube no doubt, where kids on their "crotch rocket" motorcycles gather together on the highway and do wheelies at 70 miles and hour, or go over 150 miles an hour, weaving in and out of traffic - usually with dire consequences. How does an autonomous vehicle deal with that?

Or suppose some kid decides to cut off a line of autonomous vehicles and then slam on his brakes, just for "fun" to see the robot cars all pile into each other? You might think this is farfetched, but I've seen this happen on YouTube - motorcyclists cutting off trucks and slamming on their brakes in some sort of road-rage incident. It even happened to me, once, when some dweeb in a BMW bike rode my blind spot for ten miles (smart move) and when I waved him on to pass (with less than all five fingers) he pulled in front of me and slammed on his brakes - a totally dumb move that could have left him dead and me buffing a small scratch off my bumper.

People do idiotic things, we should assume that. And the problem for autonomous vehicles won't be the technical ones, but the social ones - just as the colonization of space will present enormous technical hurdles, but even worse social hurdles. How would an autonomous Uber taxi work out? You call the car, it drives itself to you, and you find out the previous user threw up in the back seat - or left all his McDonald's wrappers in there. It already has happened in New York City with "Zipcar" (remember that? It was supposed to be the wave of the future as well!). People show up to rent their Zipcar and find the interior trashed by the previous user. It then comes down to a he-said, she-said argument as to who left the trash in the car, usually with the trashy person winning in the end.

And of course, there will be people who will stage accidents with robotic cars, claiming injury, perhaps with the aid of a friend who cuts off the robotic car and zooms away. That much is predictable.

And the cost of such vehicles isn't going to be cheap. And I think about half the actual cost will be insurance, just as half the cost of a new general aviation aircraft these days is liability insurance for the manufacturer. Owning a car may indeed become rarer in the future as few can afford to buy one. And whether non-autonomous vehicles will be allowed on future expressways is up for debate - if they are indeed allowed on public streets at all, after a certain point. At that point, the public will be at the mercy of the autonomous taxi companies. Having all your eggs in the Uber basket could be a risky move, given how aggressive and underhanded that company has been.

But are these things "just around the corner" as journalists like to say they are? I am not quite convinced. It sells eyeballs to say these things, but I suspect there will be significant delays to the introduction of the autonomous car. Like Elio's three-wheeler (what ever happened to that?) it will be introduced "next year" for years to come. And "flying cars"? Again, that is part of a government-sponsored research program, but so far, it looks as though most flying cars will be a novelty, not a reality for most Americans. And autonomous helicopter Uber taxis, well, that may take some doing. There is a reason they closed the heliport on the Pan Am building years ago.

Maybe I am jaded, but the future has been late in arriving for several decades now. We're still waiting for our clean and cheap atomic energy, our undersea tunnel to London, the rotating space station with the Hilton Hotel aboard - and of course our Moon and Mars colonies. It seems the only real advances in technology in the last few decades have been more inward-looking. We have better computers, better data collections, better ways of cataloging and monitoring our behaviors (while at the same time, they become more and more irrational).

But even if these technological wonders come to pass, I am not worried about legions of unemployed people being created as a result. At one time, every phone company had legions of telephone "operators" who connected virtually every phone call. Every major corporation had an office building in Manhattan with legions of accountants using ledgers and adding machines - and later on, primitive punch cards. At one time, every attorney had their own secretary who typed all his (and it was a his) letters by hand. At one time, even middle-class families had a "maid's quarters" or a live-in cook, in an era before dishwashers and microwaves. At one time, a typical farm had dozens, if not hundreds of employees, which today have been replaced by a handful.

All those jobs went away - or most of them did. But somehow, we managed to find new jobs, new things to do, new vocations. Unemployment is at all-time record lows, even as we still import huge amounts of goods from overseas. The "threat" of robotics to jobs is about the same as the "threat" of imports. For some reason, it seems to have taken a long time to put us all on the breadline.

So what's the point of all of this? Well, maybe that for starters, we need to take the media with a grain of salt and realize they are not informing us, but selling us to advertisers, and thus want us to click on stuff we think is cool. So they sell the idea that robots are going to take over or whatever. But it ain't about to happen just yet. And when it does happen, it will be a gradual thing that will take decades if not a century or longer - and in fact is a process that started decades ago. Yet people are still working.

So the idea that we have to "redistribute the wealth" to compensate for a robotic "AI" future that has yet to come to pass is sort of idiotic. It is just another gambit on the part of the Left to take money that doesn't belong to them on the premise that they have so little and others have so much - the argument the slackers and layabouts and communists have been making since time began.